I’m running to be the Libertarian National Committee’s Secretary to:
Build back the professionalism that we once had in the national party.
Build back the trust of the membership.
Promote transparency and civility in the LNC.
As to the former question, I…
…have been a member of the LP for over three decades.
…have run for the Maine legislature three times
…have served on the Knox County Budget Committee for over a decade, reelected twice.
…have been a delegate to 11 prior national conventions.
…have served in the Libertarian Party of Maine’s state committee as
Secretary
Treasurer
Chair
Regional Rep.
…am a co-owner and president of my family’s business, a manufacturing company with a dozen employees
Leading up to the Libertarian Party National Convention, I’ll be posting more details about my background and hopes for the future of the Libertarian Party.
So, for the umpteenth* time, I’m redesigning my blog.
This time, however, I’m dropping the “ComicsPundit” brand. It was created at a time when I thought I could focus on the intersection of two of my passions. But I was all over the place, sometimes comics, sometimes politics, sometimes both, sometimes something completely different.
So, where the domain still brings you here, and I’ll continue to use it for my e-mail, I will be eventually start using ShawnLevasseur.com to be the blog here.
To start with, I’ve put all prior posts into review. I’ll gradually post them back. Some trivial posts won’t make the cut, but most of them will get back on here.
Also, a project that I’ll be announcing soon will be taking up a lot of the posts for the next couple of months.
Update: July 15, 2024
That aforementioned project was my campaign to run for the position of Secretary on the Libertarian National Committee. That has passed, but long troubles in trying to get a new feature to work as I expected it to (custom uploaded fonts being part of the WordPress system) caused me to bounce around a variety of web hosting options.
I did consider a fully static blog, but CMSes to support it are not user-friendly, and hand coding, though possible, would be too much work and not include a critical part of a website: its RSS feed. (It’s important for me to read other websites; it’s only fair that I return the courtesy.)
But I’ve gotten fonts to work right and settled on a web host (I’d better have, I paid up for three years of discounted service). So the design work and blog post updating begin.
*_Apparently, “umpteenth” is now an actual word in the dictionary. I discovered this when spellcheck corrected a typo in the word. Language is indeed a virus.
Now, most such pleas for this change usually are rooted in some thought that the court is too much of an activist court in a liberal or conservative direction.
This article is focused more on the fairness on how the opportunities for Presidents and Senates to nominate and approve Justices occur randomly. Nixon appointed five Justices in five years. Carter in his four years, none.
In the article Andrew proposes expanding the court to eleven members with terms of 22 years each, staggered so that one term will expire every two years.
He then wrestles with thoughts on how to go about handling vacancies that occur mid-term by death, resignation, or impeachment. Here he’s trying too hard to limit a president to two appointments per term.
Just allow the President one such appointment to fill one such vacancy per term. Any more, and the seat will remain vacant until a President reelected to another term, a new President is elected, or that Justice’s term expires naturally.
At first blush, I was confused why he’d expand the size of the Court. He gives no reason that I could find. Presumably, so that he could make the terms 22 years long. I prefer the idea of the longer term, as the shorter terms of other Supreme Court term limit proposals of 10 or 12 years to be too short to preserve the independence of the court.
Twenty-two years is longer than the historical average span of the lifetime terms of the past Supreme Court Justices, and longer than three of the currently serving Justices have served.
My proposal to have replacement appointments to complete a Justice’s term, limited to one per Presidential term would mean that the court would often be at less than full membership. To my thinking, this then justifies the expansion of the Court to eleven, as it won’t always be full.
I’d even suggest that vacancies that occur with less than four years remaining in that Justice’s term remain vacant until their natural expiration date. Such vacancies would be only two members, at most.
It could happen that by some tragedy, or other circumstances, the Supreme Court is substantially depleted. There then should be a provision for a President to be allowed a second vacancy appointment per term if the court membership drops below a certain level (say, six).
If enacted, these proposals would mean that in any term, a President would appoint no less than two, potentially three (or four in unusual circumstances) Justices. Even at that only two of them would be for a full term.
Presuming any constitutional amendment authorizing this codifies the maximum number of Justices, this would prevent any court packing plans, or it’s opposite number, the contracting of the size of the court to block a President from appointing any Justices (which has happened in our history).
I think there should be a proviso that the change would take effect only after an intervening Presidential election and inauguration. That should make passage a more practical matter.
With all that in mind, here’s the amendment I crafted to fit all those ideas:
Seth Godin: ketchup enthusiast & political choice detractor
A defense of third-party politics.
Seth Godin wrote about third parties in a blog post titled “Ketchup and the third-party problem.” He says that those of us supporting third parties or their candidates are doomed to failure and miss our chance to influence the political field.
I find the argument lacking and merely a more passive-aggressive method of saying that we should all vote for Hillary because otherwise, we’ll be doomed with Trump. I’ve snarked about it on Twitter, but I feel this deserves a bit more detailed rebuttal.
Back in January, I was vacationing in San Francisco. One day while having lunch in a Chinatown restaurant, reading the USA Today, I came across an article on the opinion page by Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College. It was an article based on the main theme of his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. It was about how the abundance of choice can be a burden. I tucked the article away with some notes and only now have I finished the Fisking of Mr. Schwartz.:
